English

Conditional reasoning and the shadows it casts onto the first-order logic: the Nelsonian case

Logic 2026-01-14 v1

Abstract

We define a natural notion of standard translation for the formulas of conditional logic which is analogous to the standard translation of modal formulas into the first-order logic. We briefly show that this translation works (modulo a lightweight first-order encoding of the conditional models) for the minimal classical conditional logic CK\mathsf{CK} introduced by Brian Chellas; however, the main result of the paper is that a classically equivalent reformulation of these notions (i.e. of standard translation plus theory of conditional models) also faithfully embeds the basic Nelsonian conditional logic N4CK\mathsf{N4CK}, introduced in arXiv:2311.02361 into QN4\mathsf{QN4}, the paraconsistent variant of Nelson's first-order logic of strong negation. Thus N4CK\mathsf{N4CK} is the logic induced by the Nelsonian reading of the classical Chellas semantics of conditionals and can, therefore, be considered a faithful analogue of CK\mathsf{CK} on the non-classical basis provided by the propositional fragment of QN4\mathsf{QN4}. Moreover, the methods used to prove our main result can be easily adapted to the case of modal logic, which allows to improve an older result by S. Odintsov and H. Wansing about the standard translation embedding of the Nelsonian modal logic FSKd\mathsf{FSK}^d into QN4\mathsf{QN4}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.08786,
  title  = {Conditional reasoning and the shadows it casts onto the first-order logic: the Nelsonian case},
  author = {Grigory Olkhovikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.08786},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

53 pages, 1 figure